Scoundrels all!

Last Friday, there was a meaningless vote that nonetheless threw red meat to the anti-EU members of parliament, particularly in the Conservative Party. To reaffirm his leadership of his party, David Cameron made it a three-line whip.  They were joined in unlikely coalition with the likes of Dennis Skinner and the odious Kate Hoo-ey, I mean Hoey, to give the vote the slimmest of veneers of cross-party support.  Skinner can usually be relied upon to issue invective when any prime minister hoves into view, but here he declared his Bennite anti-EU (née EEC) credentials, saying that he had voted against involvement with our European neighbours at every opportunity, before modestly claiming that if everyone had listened to him we wouldn’t be in this mess.  Given that the mess seemed to be mostly inside the Tory party, it was a curious form of ‘I told you so’.  If he meant our relationship with Europe, then despite EU-phobes trying to bat the charge away as insulting to their reasoning faculties, nothing will change Skinner’s position and he really is deserving of EU-phobic.

Of a different political ilk that is firmly an EU-phile, Alex Salmond revealed the chippy nature of the Scottish National Party.  Just after Andy Murray had won Wimbledon, he unveiled a huge Scottish saltire behind David Cameron.  Now, I have no problem with people waving the saltire, for despite the clumsy efforts of American sports hacks to label him English, Andy Murray is indubitably Scottish and this was the first time a man from ‘north of the border’ had won the British Tennis Open since 1896.  But he is also British and Murray specifically made this point in his acceptance speech that he knew how long the crowd had waited for a British champion and he hoped he had made them proud (i.e. he was defining himself as British).  Even if Salmond had been brandishing his huge flag regularly throughout the match, I would not have a problem.  But to try and tie Andy Murray’s victory to his own political point-scoring was vulgar in the extreme.  And this a week after he presumed to know the mind of Sir Walter Scott (apparently, were he alive today Sir Walter would vote for independence).  History is littered with political leaders trying to spin sporting achievement to their own advantage from Harold Wilson calling a snap General Election in the wake of England’s football World Cup victory, to the Argentinian junta’s boosting of their own fortunes with a successful World Cup on home soil in 1978 to fascist regimes of Italy and Germany appropriating the achievements of sporting figures for their own ends.  At which point, Godwin’s Law has been reached and this entry is at an end.